Why is insight so elusive?
At face value, the ad business seems pretty simple. We meet with the client. Write a brief. Work on some ideas. Perfect them. Produce them. And measure the results. It looks like a straightforward transaction. The client buys a creative process. The creative works. The client buys more.
But there’s something missing from this simple description. And it’s the real reason most clients hire ad agencies. It’s the single most precious commodity in the ad business. Cool headlines? Nope.
I’m talking about insight.
Why is insight such a precious and rare thing today? Because so few practitioners do it well, or even understand it fully. There are millions of craftspeople out there. Millions of content creators. Millions of graphic designers with gleaming MacBook Air laptops. Millions of coders and UX people. We’ve spawned an entire generation of millennial digital natives who grew up developing, posting and crowd-funding creative and expressing themselves in the media. And many are damn good at it. These are folks who do the work and charge pennies on the dollar. And they are everywhere.
I recently met a brilliant young woman who is essentially traveling the world and eating in restaurants for free by writing sponsored blogs, shooting short films and posting on Instagram about the destination she’s visiting. How can an agency that needs to cover rent and electricity and the depreciation on a 40-foot mahogany conference room table compete with a woman whose only assets are a backpack, a portable espresso maker, and an iPhone 7 Plus?
It can’t.
Unless it offers something a millennial with wifi can’t easily deliver. Like insight.
The reasons agencies can develop insight while individuals working in their Brooklyn lofts have trouble doing so is because insight is hard, perhaps impossible, to do on one’s own. It requires wrestling in groups of three or four people that have a range of experiences, ages, perspectives, and expertise.
You can’t Snapchat your way to an insight. You can’t tweet your way to an insight. Even at 280 characters. Insight requires rolling around in the muck and goo of opinion, data, markets, personalities and audience oddities. And not everyone has the cognitive wiring or cast iron stomach for it.
Insights, to be useful and valuable, are hard-won. An insight, by definition, is not obvious. It takes some digging and thinking and arguing. It takes research and testing. It requires doing what your competition is too lazy or too myopic to do — study a market or an audience and crunch a hill of intel to find something highly refined that can be used as a creative propellant.
Another reason insights are tricky is that clients, in general, dig facts. It’s their default. And for some of them, facts seem adequate to get the job done (and, admittedly, there are times when facts are enough). According to a recent webinar I attended by Luke Sullivan, “clients just love facts” because they can measure them and test them and prove them. But insights go beyond facts. Creating insights requires connecting two or more (often unrelated) facts to make something new that is more akin to “truth” than fact. Thankfully, the best clients will abandon their puny facts in the face of a really big, juicy insight when one is available.
You may think truth and fact are the same thing. They are not. “RedBull comes in a 12-ounce can and has 111mg of caffeine,” is fact. “When the can is empty, I feel like I can take on the world,” is truth.
Do not let the facts get in the way of the truth.
As an aside, I roll my eyes at the word, “truth” as you likely do. It’s both overused and poorly understood. But there’s no other convenient way to express this concept. Truth has the benefit of being something you and your entire audience knows and believes, but can’t necessarily prove, measure or quantify. And that’s powerful stuff. So much more powerful than facts.
An example: I didn’t buy my Subaru Forester solely because it was named SUV of the year. That’s a fact. And a good one. It appeals to one’s cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that reasons and calculates. But I likely bought it because I have heard so many stories (another eye-roll-worthy word these days) of people who shower their Subaru with love. “I love my Subaru,” is a powerful platform for creative and brand exploration largely because it appeals to one’s limbic brain — the part associated with emotions — and not one’s cerebral cortex.
Best of all, as Simon Sinek points out in his famous TED talk and book, “Start With Why,” the limbic brain is also responsible for storing memories. When both memories and emotions reside in the same part of our brain, you’ve got something potent. Facts are forgettable. Insight stays with you.
So let’s talk a little bit about what an insight actually is. Because when one sits down to write a brief, or work on a client strategy, insight can be somewhat elusive. Here are a few handy definitions.
Insight is the truth (not facts) that fuels your thinking. This definition has the benefit of being the shortest. It says what it is and what it isn’t. But it’s a little pat. It does tend to spark more questions than it does answers.
Insight is the thing you just know about your brand, your audience or your market in your heart —which is located halfway between your gut and your brain. This definition helps in a big way because it reminds you that you need some data and fact from your brain, as well as some deep gut feelings to create an insight. Also, when you uncover an insight, you will feel it. Right there.
Insight is what you know about the marketing challenge that no one else has yet unearthed. This is a good one-dimensional definition of insight. It stresses the fact that insights aren’t just lying in the road for anyone to pick up. You have to discover it. Work for it. Dig for it.
Insight is something real that you know about your brand, your audience or your market that can only be proven by executing creative on it. This is a scary definition and I do not recommend that you share it with clients. It will make them nervous. Clients, generally speaking, like to prove something before they spend a lot of media and production dollars. And who can blame them? Fortunately, when clients are exposed to hard-won insights, the value becomes crystal clear to them, even if they are unproven.
Insight is the thing you can only reach after stacking data upon focus group output upon statistics upon audience personas, upon experience and gut feelings like so many well-balanced dinette chairs, and finally climb to the top and stand on your tip toes to grab it. This is a somewhat silly and deflective definition, albeit 100% accurate.
Is there one reliable definition of insight? I’m not so sure. That’s probably why I just had to use 1,180 words to talk about it.
Grant Sanders is the Creative Director at Mintz + Hoke Advertising in Avon, CT where he pursues insights daily. He lives on Nantucket Island, MA with his black dog and kindergarten-teacher wife where he mostly pursues bay scallops.
